McVie was the most reserved member of the group in the saga, although the description is relative in the context of the rock’n’roll madness and tempestuous lifestyles that characterised the times.

She joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970 from the Birmingham blues-rock band Chicken Shack. When she joined Fleetwood Mac, the group was in transition from its roots as a blues band, following the departure of guitarist Peter Green. McVie had guested on piano on the group’s early blues-based albums, but after she became a full-time member Fleetwood Mac began to embrace a more mellifluous soft-rock sound, a process which reached its culmination when the American couple Nicks and Buckingham joined the group in 1974.

This was the classic line-up that three years later recorded Rumours. By then, not only were the McVies in the throes of a divorce, but Nicks and Buckingham were also breaking up and barely on speaking terms.

Amid this emotional carnage, the group somehow managed to stay together with dogged and perhaps masochistic determination. The songs they wrote to each other resembled pages ripped from their intimate diaries, the edginess heightened by a chronic cocaine addiction that McVie shared with her fellow band members. The result was some of the most compelling and irresistible rock music of its era.

The group’s two female singers became great friends, but they also made for an intriguingly contrasting pair, their different personalities evident in concert, where McVie sat demurely to the side behind her keyboards while Nicks took centre stage and strutted her stuff without inhibition.

McVie stayed with Fleetwood Mac until 1998, when she announced her retirement. She sold her house in the US and returned to Britain, where she spent later years living peacefully in the Kent countryside, shunning the spotlight. She refused the entreaties of former bandmates to rejoin Fleetwood Mac on subsequent tours — for a while, at least.

Christine Anne Perfect was born in 1943, in Bouth, a small Lake District village near Ulverston, in Lancashire. She grew up in Smethwick, Birmingham, after her father, Cyril, a concert violinist, took up a post as a lecturer at a Birmingham college. Her mother, Beatrice, was a psychic medium and faith healer and her grandfather had been an organist at Westminster Abbey.

She took piano lessons from the age of four and continued her classical training until the age of 15, when her elder brother brought a Fats Domino songbook and she began playing rock’n’roll and rhythm and blues tunes.

She studied sculpture at art college in Birmingham for five years and during her student years played pub gigs with a band called Sounds of Blue, and occasionally singing with Spencer Davis. After completing her degree and qualifying as a teacher, she joined Chicken Shack, a blues band formed by Stan Webb and Andy Silvester, with whom she had played in Sounds of Blue.

She recorded two albums with the band and made the top ten in 1969 with I’d Rather Go Blind, a performance that helped her to win the Melody Maker poll as best female vocalist in both 1969 and 1970.

As two of the leading bands of the late 1960s British “blues boom”, Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac often shared gigs and she played piano as a guest musician on the Fleetwood Mac albums Mr Wonderful (1968) and Then Play On (1969). On Kiln House (1970), she not only played piano but also painted the album’s cover.

After leaving Chicken Shack and recording a self-titled solo album, in 1970 she married John McVie and officially joined him in the ranks of Fleetwood Mac. It was an uncertain time for the group with a constantly shifting line-up, but she contributed a number of fine songs to the albums Future Games (1971), Bare Trees (1972), Penguin and Mystery To Me (both 1973).

She contributed four songs including the title track to Heroes Are Hard to Find(1974), but by the time it was released the group — which by now had relocated to America, a move made with some reluctance by the singer — was reduced to a core trio of the McVies and drummer Mick Fleetwood.

When Fleetwood recruited the little-known duo of Nicks and Buckingham to the line-up, it seemed to be a last desperate throw of the dice for a band that was reaching the end of the line. Instead, the new arrivals transformed the group’s fortunes.

Nicks and Buckingham were fine songwriters, and McVie found their presence invigorating. She contributed three songs to Fleetwood Mac (1975), the singles Warm Ways, Over My Head and Say You Love Me, which helped the album to No 1 in the American charts and global sales of eight million.

The follow up, Rumours, was an even bigger success, staying at No 1 in the American charts for eight months. McVie’s contributions included two Top Ten singles, Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun.

The next album, Tusk (1979), was a more experimental affair, but sales of “only” four million were considered a commercial failure in the light of what had gone before.

The world tour that followed took rock’n’roll excess to new heights. They travelled by private plane with special aides assigned to carry the band’s drugs, and when they hit the ground, each member was ferried in a separate stretch limousine, while the world’s finest hotels were instructed to re-paint hotel suites in certain colours and install grand pianos in them before the band checked in.

Mirage (1982) was a return to their earlier sound, to which McVie contributed the hits Hold Me and Love In Store. As had become the Fleetwood Mac way, she couldn’t help her private life spilling over into her songs, and Hold Me was inspired by her tempestuous relationship with the infamous hellraiser Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.

As the band took a five-year hiatus, McVie released an eponymous 1984 solo album, which included the US Top Ten single Got a Hold on Me.

To Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 comeback album Tango in the Night she contributed Little Lies, one of the group’s biggest hits, co-written with her new husband Eddy Quintela. After the release of Behind the Mask (1990), McVie announced she was no longer prepared to tour and Nicks also left the band, although both appeared on stage with the group at President Clinton’s inauguration gala in 1993 to perform Don’t Stop.

She appeared on the group’s 1995 album Time and was cajoled into joining the reformed Fleetwood Mac for a sell-out tour in 1998. After that she returned to England where she bought a house in the quiet Kent village of Wickhambreaux.

She released one last solo album, In the Meantime (2004), recorded in a converted barn at her Kent home, but while promoting the record she admitted that she no longer listened to pop. She initially declined to rejoin Fleetwood Mac, with former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham noting: “She wanted to reinvent herself. She seems to want to lead the antithesis of the life she led before.”

There was an encore, however. McVie returned to the group in 2014, following what was thought to be a one-off appearance in London a year earlier. Having become a star in the Seventies, she remained one in her seventies.

Christine McVie, musician, was born on July 12, 1943. She died after a short illness on November 30, 2022, aged 79